Battle for Jerusalem

May 26, 2007

Updated Aug. 21, 2013 1:17 p.m.

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The first buildings of the Nof Zion or "View of Zion", project, a complex planned for 395 apartments, a swimming pool, sports club, luxury hotel, synagogue and shopping center, part of a Jewish neighborhood in the Arab village of Jabel Mukaber on the outskirts of Jerusalem, are seen in this Tuesday May 8, 2007 photo. Soon after Israel captured east Jerusalem in 1967, it began a second, more methodical offensive to unify the city and its holy sites under Jewish control. Its weapons have been concrete and building stones. After four decades of building new neighborhoods, the number of Jews in east Jerusalem now rivals the Arab population. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) EMILIO MORENATTI, ASSOCIATED PRESS

The first buildings of the Nof Zion or "View of Zion", project, a complex planned for 395 apartments, a swimming pool, sports club, luxury hotel, synagogue and shopping center, part of a Jewish neighborhood in the Arab village of Jabel Mukaber on the outskirts of Jerusalem, are seen in this Tuesday May 8, 2007 photo. Soon after Israel captured east Jerusalem in 1967, it began a second, more methodical offensive to unify the city and its holy sites under Jewish control. Its weapons have been concrete and building stones. After four decades of building new neighborhoods, the number of Jews in east Jerusalem now rivals the Arab population. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti) EMILIO MORENATTI, ASSOCIATED PRESS

JERUSALEM The view from Mervat Zayeha's balcony is a portrait of Israel's unceasing effort to cement its control over east Jerusalem since the capture of the city's Arab sector from Jordan 40 years ago.

On the edge of the Palestinian woman's backyard, cranes and laborers are methodically building a big Israeli housing complex that will sit inside the east Jerusalem neighborhood known as Jabel Mukaber.

To the right is the towering concrete security barrier being erected by Israel, which is dividing the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem - traditionally the focus of Palestinian life - from the Palestinian heartland of the West Bank.

Straight ahead, past the construction, the midday sun reflects off the golden stones of the Old City, the most feverishly disputed of all the areas contested between Palestinians and Israel.

Soon after Israel seized east Jerusalem in the lightning fast 1967 Mideast War, it began a second, more methodical, offensive, which continues to this day. The goal is to unify the city and its holy sites under Jewish control. Instead of rifles, its weapons have been concrete and building stones.

After four decades of building new neighborhoods, the number of Jews in east Jerusalem now rivals the Arab population.

"Jerusalem is the holiest and most important city for the Jewish people. We want to keep Jerusalem united, but we also need to make sure it retains its historical Jewish character," said Yitzhak Levy, who was Israeli construction minister in 1999-2000.

Many Palestinians fear that the city - or at least the ancient section with its sites holy to Jews, Christians and Muslims - now can never be split between Israel and a future Palestinian state, making peace impossible.

"You get angry. But what can we do?" Zayeha said, looking at the construction. "It is not in our hands."

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Almost immediately after Israeli troops routed the Jordanian army and swept over the barbed wire that had divided Jerusalem since the Jewish state's founding in 1948, Israeli city planners sprang into action.

They were in such a hurry to create Jewish neighborhoods in the captured areas, which were quickly declared annexed, that they grabbed a blueprint for a planned Tel Aviv neighborhood, added some golden stone and arched windows, and built it in Jerusalem, said Israel Kimhi, former head of long-range planning for the city.

The government began by establishing a string of neighborhoods to connect the Israeli enclave of Mount Scopus, which holds the Hebrew University and Hadassah Hospital, with Jewish populated west Jerusalem.

In a second wave of building from the mid-1970s until the '80s, Israel took the high ground on the periphery of east Jerusalem to create the neighborhoods of Neve Yaakov, Gilo and Ramot Allon.

"All those areas were looking over Jerusalem ... all of them were army positions, so it was quite easy for the government to enter the shoes of the Jordanians that left and expropriate it," said Kimhi, now head researcher at the Jerusalem Institute think tank.

Israel also expanded the boundaries of east Jerusalem from two square miles to a sprawling area of 27 square miles, incorporating outlying Arab villages.

In the 1980s, the government began building a string of West Bank settlements just outside the city, including the vast hilltop enclave of Maaleh Adumim. This created a ring around east Jerusalem, further solidifying Israeli control, Kimhi said.

Israel swept aside complaints it was violating international law by moving its own citizens onto occupied territory, arguing that the land was not technically occupied.

During this process, Israel made it difficult for east Jerusalem's Arabs to obtain building permits, forcing many to move from the city, Palestinian officials and human rights activists said.

"The plan was very simple: to get hold of the area and to consolidate control over the area, creating urban facts," said Meron Benvenisti, deputy mayor of Jerusalem in the 1970s. "It was exactly like a military strategic plan to take hold of the high ground, empty land and build there."

Israeli officials at the time promised to never give up the area, which includes the Western Wall, the last remnant of the biblical Second Temple compound and the holiest site in Judaism. The wall sits below the Al-Aqsa compound, where Muslims believe the Prophet Muhammad made his night journey to heaven.

Today, construction continues. Extensions are being developed for Jewish neighborhoods in east Jerusalem, and only the finishing touches remain for a police station in an area known as E1, where plans - currently frozen under U.S. pressure - envision a major new settlement between Jerusalem and Maaleh Adumim.

Meanwhile, private Jewish nationalist groups are buying apartments in the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City and planning major projects in other Arab neighborhoods.

"If you have Jewish life east of the Old City, obviously it's going to make it harder to divide the city," said Daniel Luria, a spokesman for the Ateret HaCohanim group, which has settled 1,200 Jews near east Jerusalem holy sites.

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From its ads, Nof Zion, or "View of Zion," looks like an idyllic community perched on an empty hill overlooking the Old City. But the area is far from empty; Zayeha and 16,000 others live here.

The complex - plans call for 395 apartments, a sports club, luxury hotel, synagogue and shopping center - is rising amid the dusty Arab neighborhood of Jabel Mukaber, which is not linked to the city's sewage system and is crisscrossed by unpaved roads.

Dror Kaveh, chief executive of Digal, the company developing the 28.5-acre project, said he had already sold a third of the initial 91 apartments, mainly to Jews in the United States. He brushed off criticism of its location.

"All Jerusalem is part Arab, part Israeli," he said. "If you want to buy in Jerusalem, in one of the oldest cities, the holiest city of them all, this is a good place to buy I think."

Residents of Jabel Mukaber said they tried to prevent Nof Zion's construction but were too exhausted by endless battles with Israel. They complained the government condemned Arab-owned land for the development and expressed resentment at how easily the project received authorization, while almost no Palestinians got building permits.

"It is totally unfair," said Ali Sawahra, 47, who lives in a two-story house with his wife, four children and the families of two older, married sons.

He pointed to the construction and said: "There he is building six or seven floors, while I am prohibited."

Jerusalem's Palestinians say the dearth of building permits forces them to live in cramped quarters or build illegally and live under the constant threat of demolition.

Rafi Shamir, a city spokesman, acknowledged the problem, but said the government was in the process of approving 50 new projects - thousands of homes - for the Arab community.

"Granted, there were problems in the past with construction, with infrastructure, but we are working now to improve the situation," he said.

Kaveh said Nof Zion will improve the neighborhood, bringing in more paved roads and a sewage system.

Standing on her balcony overlooking the work site, Zayeha, 27, said she fears the Israeli foothold in her neighborhood will not only disrupt life, but put her dream of living in the Palestinian capital even further out of reach.

"Regardless of the services or whatever good they bring, they still can't come here," she said. "We'll never accept them."

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After 40 years of construction, Jews in east Jerusalem number 190,000, rivaling the Arab population of 240,000, according to government statistics and the Jerusalem Institute.

But Israel's once-routine insistence on keeping all of east Jerusalem has softened as the Arab proportion of the city grew from 25 percent to 34 percent over the past 40 years, due to a higher birth rate. Even Israeli hawks have begun flirting with the idea of giving up some densely populated, peripheral Arab neighborhoods to ensure a Jewish majority in Jerusalem.

Otniel Schneller, a lawmaker from the ruling Kadima Party who lives in a West Bank settlement, is urging Israel to cede neighborhoods with no historical or religious meaning for Jews. That will solidify Israel's hold over the more important neighborhoods, including the Old City, which it can never relinquish, he said.

"It does not belong to the Israeli Jewish people, it belongs to the Jewish nation," Schneller said.

A handful of Arab neighborhoods, including a Palestinian refugee camp, have already been cut off from Jerusalem by the towering concrete wall along Israel's West Bank separation barrier.

That isolates tens of thousands of Jerusalem's Arab residents from the rest of the city, said Rami Nasrallah, head of the International Peace Cooperation Center, a Palestinian group.

The barrier, which Israel says is needed to keep out Palestinian militants, has also undermined east Jerusalem's status as the de facto Palestinian capital and forced Palestinian civil, cultural and political institutions to relocate to the West Bank city of Ramallah.

"They are doing everything to turn the city into a Jewish city," Nasrallah said, adding Israel's maneuvers make the prospects for peace even more remote.

Despite the continued building, Israeli doves say the city can still be split. They point to plans discussed during the failed 2000 peace negotiations to use a complex series of bridges and tunnels to create separate Jewish and Palestinian Jerusalems.

"It will be more difficult every passing year," said dovish Israeli lawmaker Yossi Beilin. "(But) the challenges are surmountable."

Some Palestinian officials worry that the two sides are now so enmeshed it will be impossible to pry them apart.

Hana Amireh, a member of the Jerusalem committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization, said the Palestinians made a grave error by not resolving the issue when they negotiated interim peace accords with Israel in the early 1990s.

He said the two sides should quickly resolve their competing claims to the city.

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